Everything You Know (2020)

Everything You KnowZoë Heller Everything You Know I am bad A bad bad man Willy Muller tells us and on first evidence the reader might be inclined to agree A suspected murderer and a confirmed hack the protagonist of Everything You Know is a Holly

Title: Everything You Know

Author: Zoë Heller

ISBN: 9780140282078

Page: 436

Format: None

Everything You KnowZoë Heller I am bad A bad, bad man, Willy Muller tells us, and on first evidence the reader might be inclined to agree A suspected murderer and a confirmed hack, the protagonist of Everything You Know is a Hollywood style bottom feeder with no evident sense of shame In London, years ago, Willy went to prison for killing his wife Once released on appeal, he alienated his few rem I am bad A bad, bad man, Willy Muller tells us, and on first evidence the reader might be inclined to agree A suspected murderer and a confirmed hack, the protagonist of Everything You Know is a Hollywood style bottom feeder with no evident sense of shame In London, years ago, Willy went to prison for killing his wife Once released on appeal, he alienated his few remaining friends by writing a tell all memoir of his married life before making the natural progression to churning out second rate sleb bios The crap just bubbles out of me, uncorrupted, Willy muses, half proud, half appalled Bad writing is my gift Did Willy kill his wife Or did she hit her head in a fall Either way, he is still alarmingly full of bile, raging against a world populated by malignant dwarfs, trolls, and lipsticked ferrets When his daughter kills herself using pills, Willy counts his blessings after all, Sadie might have done herself in in any number of vulgar or grotesque ways The man even calls his dying German mother Herr Kommandant to her face Temporarily shacked up in Puerto Vallarta with his girlfriend, a cosmetic surgery victim who wears a perpetual expression of parched exhilaration, Willy takes his rage out on everyone around him, including himself In fact, he waxes almost loving about his own physical decay his skin with its ancient, battered look of fried liver, ears with a violet tinge at their curly edges, like exotic salad leaves, sagging belly gazing up at him like an affectionate haggis There are certainly pleasures to be found in this particular brand of literary nastiness, although Willy does pick some rather large and stationary targets agents, facelifts, pretentious directors with German accents, and so on Happily, debut novelist Zoe Heller has something larger in mind than the spectacle of a man savaging everything hateful in reach, and the book undergoes a subtle shift in tone midway through The medium is Sadie s diary, delivered to Willy s door four months after her death Written in a style as straightforward and affecting as Willy s is blustering and cruel, it describes a childhood of Dickensian loneliness and an adult life ruled by a heartbreaking and unsuccessful search for love At first Willy can t read without feeling terrible, fluttery pains in his gut Later, however, the diary elicits what is at least in Willy s terms a kind of moral thaw Only when you die do you run out of chances to be good Until then, there is always the possibility of turning yourself around, his accountant tells him, and amazingly, Willy pays heed Fortunately, for those of us who have come to enjoy his misanthropy, not too much heed to the bitter end, he can t help noting of his former sister in law, Boy, did her arse get big It s a mark of Heller s skill that we never stop caring about Willy, no matter how repulsive he seems half victim, half perpetrator, half German, half Jew, he muddles through life with a moral passivity that might resemble our own Everything You Know is a sharp, stylish, and wickedly funny first novel, but like its hero, it has real sadness concealed underneath Mary Park

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The first Zoe Heller novel I read, The Believers, left me manically scouring the library for of her work I found Everything You Know a novel with characters easily as cringe worthy as the Litvinoffs who feature in The Believers It is the story of Willy Muller whose life has a delightful awfulness about it Written in the first person narrative, Heller treats the reader to Willy s sarcastic, witty outlook, his superbly droll thoughts and wry observations He has a dim witted girlfriend, one daught [...]

Willy Muller is a truly horrible person His wife died from a fall that may, or may not, have resulted from him shoving her One of his daughters won t talk to him, and the other one, also estranged, committed suicide One of her last acts before ending her life was to send Willy 11 years of her journals, and he responds to the posthumous package with deep callousness She had succumbed to the sentimentalities of leave taking, he says Christ, isn t life hard enough without that sort of hokey melodra [...]

Only when you die do you run out of chances to be good.Until then, there is always the possibility of turning yourself around Zoe Heller s debut book has a pretty tried and tested concept of parental old age remorse handled with freshness and fiestiness of her prose There were places, I rued the fact I was reading a hard copy because I can t highlight a quote for future reading Not her best, but can t help feeling the need for a fan club for Heller both of them, why not after finishing the book. [...]

I really enjoyed Heller s other books, including Notes on a Scandal and The Believers , so I assumed I would also enjoy this one And I am very impressed that a young beautiful woman like the author can write so realistically a story narrated by a prickly old guy who is recovering from a heart attack and reminiscing on his past mistakes as a drinker, womanizer, and absentee father However, I am tired of the genre of the old guy seeking redemption for his atrociously bad conduct, while still activ [...]

Heller is a beautiful and very talented writer and story teller And her ability to write such a complex main character, who s male, is exceptional But despite that I struggled to completely enjoy the book as it s just so depressingly sad and the characters are not hugely likeable that normally doesn t bother me but the combination of the hopelessness and darkly sad characters makes it a book that I struggled to really enjoy In saying that I read it in 24hrs This however does not put me off readi [...]

Willy Muller is a great character, the anti hero at the diseased heart of Zo Heller s debut novel What makes the book so satisfying is not its originality rather, it is the delicate and wickedly funny way that Heller makes her germophobic protagonist sympathetic even as the situation gets worse Willy might have been gleefully played by Jack Nicholson in his prime We cringe to watch him, but we peek through our fingers to see what he will do next Also, we hope against hope that he might suddenly [...]

Zoe Heller is one of my favourite authors She really needs to pull her finger out On completion of this, her first book, I have now read everything that she has produced.Her last book, the believers, was six years ago.This book is short but perfectly formed The construct works well Willy Muller is in hospital, looking back on the women in his life.This includes two current lovers, an ex wife whom he accidentally killed in an accident with a fridge, one daughter who hates him sadie and one that h [...]

Heller s freshman effort, Everything You Know, shows what would happen if she d never learned to dial back some of her baser instincts unbelievable pairings, absurd situations and characters too wrapped up in their own drama The choice of protagonist alone takes getting used to Willy, a curmudgeonly writer, follows up a health crisis by reading through his daughter s journals, the only connection left months after her suicide Willy and the type ridden supporting cast has a lot of implausible and [...]

I think Zoe Heller may be a one hit wonder Notes on a Scandal is one of my favorite novels, so I wanted to read her other books The Believers was underwhelming, but far better than Everything You Know Frankly, EYK was boring the plot was very minimal, and the characters were superficial and unlikable Based on the reviews and the marketing, it seems EYK is supposed to be a dark comedy however, the tone is too flippant to be dark, and too cynical to be comedic My greatest vexation with EYK was the [...]

I absolutely loved this book My only concern was at one point the echoes of the following excerpt from a letter by Evelyn Waugh were so close that it did make me wonder however knowing Heller s excellence as a writer I believe that this is either a coincidence or an unwitting echo from something she read a long time ago and had forgotten In the hope of keeping him Winston Churchill s son quiet for a few hours Freddy and I have bet Randolph 20 that he cannot read the whole Bible in a fortnight It [...]

Pleasure was had from Zo Heller s first novel Everything You Know, which has one of the most acerbic misanthropes I ve encountered in the past year or so His hatred of London and New York is so intense and so exquisitely described that any reader who hasn t been to these cities would probably never want to visit He has a troubled relationship with his daughters one of whom kills herself and in his youth had served time for the murder of his wife acquitted on appeal Despite his dislike for people [...]

I love the way Zo Heller writes her characters Her first person narratives really dig into the character s psyche and showcases all the warts, immoral thoughts and true dichotomy that lives within all us This novel follows a couple weeks in the life of Willy Muller A British man acquitted of killing his wife years ago, living in LA who just received noticed that his daughter committed suicide We watch Willy recover from a heart attack, cheat on his girlfriend, attempt to reconcile with his famil [...]

I read this book thinking it was a new one from Zoe Heller, but Everything You Know is in fact her first book, written before Notes on a Scandal It s not as well crafted an effort the structure not quite strong enough to sustain it even over just 200 pages and I m not sure that her main character Willy Muller, a philandering fiftysomething writer best known for the book he wrote in the aftermath of being acquitted of his wife s murder, who lives in self imposed exile from the UK and has nonexist [...]

I always find Zoe Heller s books about redemption of sometimes disgusting characters intriguing The characters have got just a crack of goodness in them somewhere, and that s enough The books usually end with the character taking just one step toward the better part of themselves, and it s up to you to imagine the rest She really knows how to describe the sometimes ugly nitty gritty of humanness though Not all the characters see the light either.

One of those books in which not a great deal happens, but the writing is of such a consistently high standard, as well as being very funny, that it hardly matters Like Zoe Heller s other novel Notes on a Scandal , this features a dislikeable narrator and a lot of sniffy commentary, and aside from a slightly curious ending, I enjoyed it What I was most impressed by was the creation, by a female author, of a male narrator who is most definitely, unquestionably, a Bloke.

I enjoyed this book although the narrative voice of the self centred central character wasn t likeable I thought it worked well the juxtaposition of his trivial and pointless existance with the intimate diary written by his daughter who had recently committed suicide I wanted to hear about her life, I felt like reaching out to help her.

I loved the descriptions, really original, wish I could write like it Interesting that the author writes as a older man and yet is so convincing Perhaps though if I were an older man I would think differently and feel that the author has got us all wrong A difficult read at times but I enjoyed it.

Give a book 100 pages before you give up on it someone once told me, then you will be really connected to the characters At 196 pages, once I had got to 100 I thought I may as well go the whole hog Turns out I will not be following that piece of advice again I don t think 1000 pages could have connected me to Willy Muller in any sense, and Willy himself seems utterly disconnected from every other character in the book, even those he has chosen to share his life with To be fair, his perceptions w [...]

This is not as good as Heller s Notes On A Scandal, which was an effective look at manipulative relationships perhaps far fetched, but believable for all that This is funnier, but just less believable, and that is probably what makes this a less good book It is readable and enjoyable, but fails to quite find the ethical dilemmas that made Notes so much fun to read because of the depth they added and by making the book thought provoking.Am I saying, this book is too shallow Perhaps There is some [...]

I read Everything You Know because I was so impressed with Heller s What Was She Thinking and had I done it the other way around I d never have gotten to Thinking Everything You Know reminded me of Kingsley Amis Lucky Jim only nowhere near as funny Its style stuck me as a blend of what, for lack of a better term, I d call magic realism, with a narrative intended to gradually reveal the character s psychopathy or at least pathological narcissism except that Muller comes across as a jerk from the [...]

I enjoyed this story It takes place in England, America and Mexico and in my humble opinion I really think Miss Heller s writing comes alive when she depicts the English.That to me is where she absolutely shines The other parts are fun, amusingbut her talent lies here.or there, if you re not reading this in Britain.

Zoe Heller s debut novel is brilliant Willy Muller is a curmudgeon and embittered journalist who has survived imprisonment after being convicted of murdering his wife, Oona The story is not about whether or not he killed his wife, it is about redemption, as his financial adviser says to him, Only when you die do you run out of chances to be good It is a compelling read Best, LHlifang leehong

Zoe Heller was born in London, England in 1965 and educated at Oxford University, UK and Columbia University, New York, USA She is a journalist who, after writing book reviews for various newspapers, became a feature writer for The Independent in England She wrote a weekly confessional column for the Sunday Times in London for four years, but now writes for the Daily Telegraph in London and earned the title Columnist of the Year in 2002 A suspected murderer and a confirmed hack is the protagonis [...]

Initially I thought I wasn t going to like this book, with its bitter, misanthropic narrator Willy, who appears to be quite comfortable with his own nastiness But the second half was better and interesting than the first, as Willy starts to recognise how badly he has failed the family he abandoned, and realises that only when you die do your run out of chances to be good There are some scenes here that are so excruciating e.g Willy s encounter with his older daghter that they make you wince.Hel [...]

I ve given this a 3, but I m not sure that s the right decision It certainly doesn t reflect the quality of the writing, which is up to Zoe Heller s usual shining standards It s just that it didn t capture my attention the way her other books have done, and I found it hard to care about the protagonist The narrator is a nasty person who is cut off from his own feelings, and his flat experience of the world is so well portrayed that I found myself echoing it, and not caring either He had the inci [...]

I don t precisely know why, but I love the work of Zoe Heller I very much enjoyed Notes on a Scandal a month or so ago, but I have to say that I enjoyed this, her first novel, even better Heller writes breezy satirical stuff about various absurd characters who often have some relationship to the film and media worlds Our protagonist here, Willy, is a lot of a dick in that he s done some jail time for killing his wife, he s written a tell all memoir about it and he carries on in appalling fashion [...]